Interesting Snippets

A new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that 74% of smartphone owners use their phone to get real-time location-based information, and 18% use a geosocial service to “check in” to certain locations or share their location with friends.

Message Optimizer turns every mobile phone into a mobile computing and mobile authentication device,” states ForgetMeNot Africa. The MO allows “more and more of our subscribers to get access to the internet without having to purchase expensive smartphones,” according to Douglas Mboweni, the chief executive officer of Econet Wireless Zimbabwe, a mobile network. How does the MO deliver messages without the internet or a personal computer? First, a mobile phone subscriber sends an SMS to a given short code. The message is received in the mobile company’s message centre, which then forwards to ForgetMeNot Africa’s internet servers. The servers process, route and deliver the message to the subscriber, who can then respond… The company currently has around 48 million users, having made inroads into east, west, southern and central Africa

nearly 37 percent of smartphone users in EU5 reported accessing news sites via an app or browser in January 2012, showing an increase of 74 percent over the past year. For EU5 smartphone users who accessed news sites on a near-daily basis, the growth rate was even stronger at 82 percent. The UK showed the highest penetration with nearly half (46.8 percent) of smartphone users reporting having accessed news sites at least once in the past month.

Google’s lead product manager for mobile search ads, Surojit Chatterjee, tells us that in December 2011 mobile search ad request volume was more than twice as high as it was in December 2010. Mobile search in general has grown five-fold worldwide in just the past two years, which is a rate comparable to the early days of desktop Google Search

every year about 200 million people are going online for the very first time.

However, traditional internet access via a copper wire and a desktop PC will fade into the background.

The rapid fall in the cost of smartphones - with cheap versions now costing about $100 - means that by 2016 about 80% of all internet users will access the web using a mobile phone.

mobile broadband subscriptions will reach almost 5 billion in 2016, up from the expected 900 million by the end of 2011.That would represent 60 percent year-on-year growth, at the same time as the data consumed by smartphone users is surging. Total smartphone traffic is expected to triple during 2011.